Action Guidelines and Best Practices

When considering what kinds of actions to create, or even when creating the actions themselves, keep these suggestions in mind.

• When customizing action layouts, consider what your users will do with them. Minimalism is key. Include only the fields that are necessary for them and for whomever handles the cases, calls, or records that result from those actions.
• Don’t use actions for simple navigation shortcuts. They're designed to perform a function.

• Give your actions task-oriented names that tell your users what they do. Use terms such as New, Create, Share, Update, or Import. Keep names short and descriptive.

• Create a global action if you're contemplating something that your users need to do that isn't tied to a specific object and that you want to be accessible from anywhere.
• Use the Description field to create notes for yourself about each action. Notes are especially useful if you’re creating several similar actions for different record types, for example. The description appears in the list of buttons, links, and actions for object-specific actions, or in the list of global actions, as well as on the detail page for the action. Your notes aren’t visible to users.
• There is no hard limit to the number of fields you can add to an action layout. However, for optimum usability, we recommend a maximum of 8 fields. Adding more than 20 fields can severely impact user efficiency. To reduce the number of fields in your layout, you can create predefined values for the required fields, and then remove those fields from your layout. You can set predefined field values from the action detail page.